Innholdsfortegnelse for 8 November 2024 i Guardian Weekly

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In the areas worst affected by the torrential downpours and flooding that hit the east coast of Spain, more than 400 litres of rain per square metre fell last Tuesday. Rubén del Campo, a spokesman for Spain’s meteorological agency, told El País: “A relatively strong storm, a powerful downpour, like those we see falling in spring or summer, can be 40 or 50 litres per square metre. This practically multiplies it by 10.” The intense rain, which led to the deaths of at least 214 people, was attributed to a phenomenon known as the gota fría, or “cold drop”, which occurs when cold air moves over the warm waters of the Mediterranean Sea. This phenomenon creates atmospheric instability as the warm, moist air rises rapidly to form towering, dense clouds…

Labour’s first UK budget in almost 15 years marked a radical departure with past constraints on investment spending. New rules allow long-term planning and introduce safeguards governing how the extra cash is spent. But what are the more immediate implications? Will the budget kickstart growth? The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), which provides the government with independent economic forecasts, said extra spending in the first two years would expand the economy more than Jeremy Hunt’s March budget, but act as a modest drag on the former Conservative chancellor’s plans stretching to 2029. The end result, according to the OBR, is no economic benefit from £70bn ($90bn) of extra annual spending. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) described the budget as a brave investment, because all the benefit would emerge after…

Lately, Levan cannot stop thinking about the time he saw Russian tanks roll into his hometown of Gori, an hour’s drive from Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi. In 2008, Gori was bombed and occupied during a short and deadly war that left 20% of the country – though not the city – under de-facto Russian control. “When Russia invaded Ukraine, we began to worry they might come here again,” Levan said. About 2,000km to the west, Sergiu, 62, has his own experiences with Russian aggression. In 1991, he was drafted in the Moldovan capital, Chișinău, and sent to Transnistria to fight Russian forces after the restive region had broken away from Moldova. The brief conflict ended in a 1992 ceasefire that left more than a thousand Russian troops stationed in Transnistria, which…

After swapping machetes and binoculars for computer screens and laser mapping, a team of researchers have discovered a lost Maya city containing temple pyramids, enclosed plazas and a reservoir which had been hidden for centuries by the Mexican jungle. The discovery in the south-eastern Mexican state of Campeche came after Luke Auld-Thomas, an anthropologist at Northern Arizona University, began wondering whether non-archaeological uses of the state-of-the-art laser mapping known as lidar could help shed light on the Maya world. “For the longest time, our sample of the Maya civilisation was a couple of hundred square kilometres total,” Auld-Thomas said. “That sample was hard won by archaeologists who painstakingly walked over every square metre, hacking at the vegetation with machetes, to see if they were standing on a pile of rocks…

Fifty years ago, in a corner of white South Africa, Muhammad Ali already seemed a miracle-maker. Deep in our strictly regimented and divided country, Ali danced rings around apartheid. I had first heard about the inspirational boxer from a black man, Cassius, who sold beer from the illegal shebeen he ran across the road from our house. Whenever my football flew over the garden wall, Cassius chased after it. After a dazzling display of slightly drunken footwork he would return the ball. One day, while showcasing his trickery, he sang a strange song: “Ali, Ali, float like a butterfly, sting like a bee, Ali, Ali, Muhammad Ali.” Cassius flicked rangy left jabs into the winter sunshine as his huge feet danced. He pretended to be outraged when I asked who…

The concept of “elite overproduction” was developed by social scientist Peter Turchin around the turn of this century to describe something specific: too many rich people for not enough rich-person jobs. It’s a byproduct of inequality: a tonne of poor people, sure, but also a superfluity of the wealthy, without enough positions to house them in the influence and status to which they think themselves entitled. In a modern context, that would mean senior positions in the government and civil service, along with the top tier of finance and law, but Turchin tested the hypothesis from ancient Rome to 19th-century Britain. The names and nature of the contested jobs and titles changed; the pattern remained. Turchin predicted in 2010 that by the 2020s it would be destabilising US politics. In…

A white, hippo-like snout, matched in bulbosity by a well-padded paunch, no facial features bar a pair of inquisitive eyes: the simple rendering of the Finnish author Tove Jansson’s protagonist Moomintroll was key to the enduring success of her series of children’s books. However, ahead of next year’s 80th anniversary of one of the most beloved set of literary characters ever created for children, Jansson’s home town, Helsinki, is shifting the spotlight to more complex marks made by the artist. Among them are intricate panoramas drawn in charcoal on tracing paper, oil-painted vignettes rendered on glass and monumental landscapes lavished on plaster walls. Paradise, an exhibition at the Helsinki Art Museum, focuses for the first time on the murals and frescoes Jansson was commissioned to paint on the walls of factory…

It drives me nuts when a recipe calls for Yukon gold, russet, waxy or fl oury potatoes. In Spain, we seem to just have potatoes. How can I tell if it’s floury, waxy or whatever? And does it really matter ? Nicola, Barcelaona, Spain The short answer is, yes, it does matter, because there is such a difference between one type of potato and the next. The good news, for you, is that, if you’re shopping locally, the potatoes you get throughout the year will probably be the right ones for that given moment – rather than focusing on the variet y, seasonality is the main thing here. The longer the tubers stay in the ground, the larger they will grow, and the tougher their skin and, crucially, the higher…

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1 UNITED STATES World watches anxiously as America decides American voters headed to the polls on Tuesday, as the US and the world waited on tenterhooks to see who would emerge as the country’s next president. The election brought to an end a remarkable election campaign that divided American society and upped the stress levels of many citizens amid fears of civil unrest. The Democratic candidate Kamala Harris’s campaign tried to represent a page turning on the era of her Republican counterpart, Donald Trump, and the threat of his return to the White House. She acknowledged that calling Trump a fascist was a fair reflection of his political beliefs, while insisting that she would serve all sides of America’s deeply fractured political landscape. Trump ran a campaign fuelled by a sense…

Move on. Nothing to see here. Just another ordinary, everyday apocalypse. If past experience is any guide, the world’s reaction to the floods in Spain last week will be similar to that of motorway drivers at a crash scene: slow down, take in the horror, outwardly express sympathy, inwardly give thanks that fate picked someone else. That is the pattern in our climate-disrupted era when extreme-weather catastrophes have become so commonplace that they risk being normalised. Instead of outrage and determination to reduce the dangers, there is a sense of complacency: these things happen. Someone else is responsible. Somebody else will fix it. Nothing could be further from the truth. The unnatural disaster in Spain – Europe’s deadliest flash floods in at least half a century – is evidence of…

Bin bags were piling up at one end of the chaotic main thoroughfare in Shuafat refugee camp last Friday morning as shoppers walked by, stepping over a stream of wastewater trickling from a nearby drainpipe. Poor sanitation is just one of the UN-administered Palestinian camp’s problems – but things will get much worse. Despite huge international pressure not to jeopardise the work of Unrwa, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, the Israeli parliament voted last week to ban the organisation from operating on its soil. It also declared it a terror group, in effect severing all cooperation and communication between the UN agency and the Jewish state. At present it is unclear how the new laws, which are supposed to come into effect in under than 90…

Bhutan is a tiny country of mountains and clouds nestled between giants: it shares borders with China and India. Known as “the kingdom of happiness” because of its focus on measuring gross national happiness (GNH), its approach to development is based on the Buddhist idea of the “middle way”, or the pursuit of balance, rather than extremes. But lately, the balance has been off. GNH, first measured by Bhutan in 2008, is calculated using surveys of 148 questions, conducted in person every few years. The most recent survey, from 2022, sampled 1.4% of the population and gave the country an average happiness score of 0.781 out of one, a score that defines the Bhutanese as 3.3% happier than they were in 2015. But despite its cheerful reputation, the country is…

IN THE SUMMER OF 2019, WHEN JOE WAS 21, he went on a university rugby tour of California. One night, one of his teammates bought some cannabis edibles to share, and Joe ate some. For the next 12 hours, he believed he was in hell. He was on fire; his body was suffused with pain. His ears were filled first with incoherent screaming and then with sinister whispering. Joe’s friends thought their teammate’s bad trip was funny, even as they wrestled him away from the windows when he tried to jump from the seventh floor of their hotel. When he woke up the next morning, Joe was still in hell. A devilish, humanoid form lurking in the periphery of his vision was telling him he had died. A chorus of…

Oulu is five hours north from Helsinki by train and a good deal colder and darker each winter than the Finnish capital. From November to March its 220,000 residents are lucky to see daylight for a couple of hours a day and temperatures can reach the minus 30s. However, this is not the reason I sense a darkening of the Finnish dream that brought me here six years ago. In 2018, moving to Finland seemed like a no-brainer. A year earlier I had met my Finnish partner while working in Oulu. My adopted home of Italy, where I had lived for 10 years, had recently elected a coalition government with the far-right Matteo Salvini as interior minister, while my native UK had voted for Brexit. Given Finland’s status as a…

* All solutions published next week Across 4 Cat rough in the stomach, being taken for a ride? (6) 6 ‘Nobel Prize winner!’ editor screamed (8) 9 Ring again to cancel (6) 10 Smoking area I sound hesitant to install in work room (5,3) 11 Cut up into fragments, had jolly time collecting them (11) 15 Carrying papa colt moved easily, but noisily? (7) 17 Confrontation between gangs over some grass? (4,3) 18 Vain monarch made out as a virtuoso pianist (11) 22 One PM, short bloke, EU citizen (8) 23 It’s doubly dotty to write in German (6) 24 Capital’s sweetheart, old Scottish singer (8) 25 Force’s uniform concealed by gown (6) Down 1 Arab puts question to video game pioneer (6) 2 Sexually perverted cat? (7,3) 3 Struggle…

ECONOMY Budget heralds massive tax and spending package Rachel Reeves used her budget debut to announce a massive package of tax, spending and borrowing increases as she gambled on voters rewarding the government for patching up crumbling public services. Insisting that she was delivering on the choices the public made in July’s general election, the chancellor told businesses and the better off that they must bear the brunt of £40bn ($52bn) of tax increases needed for an emergency NHS cash injection and to plug the hole in the public finances inherited from the Conservatives. The chancellor raised £25bn by increasing employer national insurance contributions and hit those on higher incomes through increases in capital gains and inheritance tax, and changes to the rules covering wealthy foreign individuals living in Britain.…

Depending on whom you ask, they are the boost that Russian forces need to make a significant breakthrough in Ukraine, or they are simple cannon fodder, destined for repatriation in body bags. After weeks of speculation, Nato and the Pentagon have confirmed that around 10,000 North Korean troops are in Russia, with most massing near Ukraine’s border in Kursk, where the Kremlin’s forces have struggled to repel a Ukrainian incursion. US officials believe the North Koreans could enter the conflict imminently, as the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, pleads with his country’s allies to “ stop watching ” while his troops prepare to confront a new enemy. It is too early to say how the Russian-North Korean “ blood alliance” will change the dynamics of the conflict. But not one of…

The storming of Solino began in the dead of night with dozens of gang fighters marauding into one of the last bastions of safety in Haiti’s beleaguered capital, Port-au-Prince. As teenage gunmen torched houses and fired into the air, residents fled on foot, carrying whatever they could take before the area was captured: children, bundles of clothing, suitcases, chairs. Six hours after the attack began, the mood in neighbouring Kokiyo was still tense. A pile of wooden furniture – salvaged from a Solino home before the fighters could arrive – had been propped up against a wall on the rocky trail that winds through the area. A man with a machete stood guard at one of its entrances. In nearby Christ Roi, a barricade had been fashioned from two battered…

Justin Trudeau, who promised “sunny ways” as he won an election on a wave of public fatigue with an incumbent Conservative government, is now facing his darkest and most uncertain political moment as he attempts to defy the odds to win a rare fourth term. The prime minister appears to have ignored both the demands of a handful of his own MPs calling for him to resign and threats from a separatist party looking to unravel his party’s tenuous hold on power. Nearly two dozen backbench Liberal MPs signed a letter last month calling for Trudeau to step down amid fears that his unpopularity could lead to a crushing electoral defeat in the coming months. The letter was separate from a “code red” petition to grassroots party supporters calling for…

Benjamin Zephaniah did it. So did Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. Howard Gayle, the pioneering black footballer, did it without a second thought. Britain, keen to highlight their achievements as outstanding citizens who have made a notable contribution to how we live, dangled the recognition of a state-backed honour in front of each of them. And each, ultimately unable to reconcile the link between those honours and the misty-eyed evocation in the title of Britain’s brutal empire, said “no thanks”. Or “up yours”, in the case of Zephaniah, who said: “I get angry when I hear that word ‘empire’; it reminds me of slavery.” Many others have rejected honours privately. According to the Mail on Sunday and a new biography of King Charles by the royal watcher Robert Hardman, we may be approaching,…

Ali Smith has never been afraid to take cleverness seriously. It is a distinctly European sensibility, yet its fullest vindication came amid the xenophobic pageantry of Brexit. The Seasonal Quartet was the work of an intellectual first responder, urgently cataloguing the treasures of pluralism as the body politic celebrated its sweaty fiesta of insularity. Not many novelists could pull that off. That crisis has been subsumed by bigger ones, and Smith hasn’t been standing idly by. Gliff is to be followed in 2025 by Glyph, a sister novel that will further explore “how we make meanings and … are made meaningless”. As ever, Smith delights in sportive wordplay, but those obliquely iterating titles belie a frank clarity of purpose. The world is on fire, Ali Smith is here to tell…

Mist sweeps across the valley, swirling around the treetops. Yet, it is a small light beneath the beech canopy that draws my attention, where dense mosses cloak a tree stump. The mosses are careful neighbours, each species taking its own portion of the bark. The deeper tones of Polytrichum formosum, bank haircap, border the lighter Hypnum cupressiforme, Cypress-leaved plait-moss. A fat raindrop lands in my eye. After the shock of the intrusion, I open it again and turn it back to the mosses. It feels cleansed; I am seeing more clearly. Water lands on the leaves and on the tips of scattered sporophytes – slender shoots topped by capsules containing spores. Tiny raindrops settle on the capsules like a sprinkling of glitter. The sound of rain through the beech leaves…

Across 1 Stamp (6) 4 Magnify too much (6) 8 Sixties drummer (5) 9 Windfall (7) 10 Saying (7) 11 First prime minister of the Republic of India (5) 12 Heated ruckus and agitation (4-5) 17 Molten matter (5) 19 First book (7) 21 Type of cider (7) 22 Mitre (anag.) (5) 23 Humdrum (6) 24 In a feeble way (6) Down 1 Sticky and flowing (6) 2 Hanging car (7) 3 Abrade (5) 5 Wine seller (7) 6 Farmstead (5) 7 Hard to see through (6) 9 Carrier of young kid (4,5) 13 Writing and speaking rules (7) 14 Veil (7) 15 Occupied (6) 16 Afield (6) 18 Stuff (5) 20 Salt – inter (anag.) (5) Solution No 16,993…